Saturday, May 25, 2013

We never really got any snow this year. And the kids have never had the experience of playing in deep snow, which seems like a grievous omission, so on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend we packed everybody up and headed up Mt. Rainier. (The last time we were there was also Memorial Day weekend, eight years ago when Kate was just five months old.)

The visitor's center at Paradise.

We ate our lunch by the pika picture (awwww!) and then went out to play in the snow.

The sky was cloudy but the glare off the snow was still pretty uncomfortable. Doug has photo gray lenses that darken automatically when he goes outside. The rest of us are not so lucky.

Kate says, "This is not working!" Ha. I think she was expecting to be able to be able to dive and burrow through the snow like a cartoon mole.

The view (gorgeous!)

We spent the whole time passing Andy back and forth, as he didn't like the glare, didn't know what to think of the snow, and didn't have snow pants. Andy's on the small side, but still gets heavy when you're trekking up a snowy ridge at high altitudes!

We found a little cave for Kate the Snow Dragon.

Andy actually fell asleep at one point.

Kate was able to do some belly sliding on her winter coat (see video at the end) and got completely soaked. We brought along dry clothes for everybody, which turned out to be a good thing.

Heading back down the mountain...

This little fox came right up to the car and looked at us expectantly. I think somebody's been feeding him.

We stopped to check out this waterfall.

End-of-the-day pho. Just the thing after snowy fun.

And here's a video of Kate belly-siding down the mountain.

It was all great fun and completely exhausting. I was glad we did it on Saturday rather than Monday--we needed the recovery time! We're thinking of going back this summer when the wildflowers are blooming.